Cybernetic Information
Timothy Deane-Freeman · Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2024
This chapter reads Deleuze alongside information theory and cybernetics, drawing out the ways in which the specific terms of Deleuze’s engagement with these fields may have caused him to overlook certain possibilities inherent to the digital image. Alongside Shannon and Weaver’s influential “mathematical theory of communication,” the chapter explicates the cybernetically informed philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, himself an important influence on Deleuze. From these sources is derived an account of “noise” as a specific kind of information-a non-systematised content which acts as the potential for radically new processes of individuation. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ways in which this conception of noise can help us to understand not only the noetic potentials of art, but the potentials of an art composed through digital images specifically.